Alexander Jablokov's Blog, page 13

An Interstellar encounter

Science fiction movies come in two main categories, both large: the loud, weaponized alien invasion type, with stuff blowing up and carefully placed taglines, and the spiritually transcendent Big Idea kind with soaring music and people staring off at things. Chistopher Nolan's recent Interstellar is definitely that second kind.

It was OK, actually. It had some good science fiction stuff in it, though its best parts seemed to crib a bit too much from the 2013 Cuaron film Gravity (a vastly super...

Starting with Scrivener

Someone always has a piece of software that will make your life better in some way. And you know the kind of person too: bright-eyed, evangelistic, full of tips and tricks, obscure menu items, time-saving keystroke combinations...

And sometimes, they are right. They just need to overcome my suspicion first.

All writers, at least in my field, at some point talk about Scrivener, the program from Literature and Latte. It's a program that gives you a variety of ways to outline and plot, as well as...

The "crazy uncle" instructs

A few weeks ago I wrote about my role as the crazy uncle of writing workshops.

Now you can confirm or deny this clame for yourself. Jeanne Cavelos just sent me a link to two segments of my clueless rant about perceptive analysis of plot. Now you can check out what my students are exposed to.

I am podcast #76 here. If you get a chance, let me know what you think.

Can a "mad annotator" be female?

I'm fiddling with a story that has an annotator. You know,one of those secondary unreliable narrators who add notes to what purports to be the main narrative, arguing with it, subverting it, sometimes amplifying it. Just to make it more complicated, the main story is itself a lexicon, a collection of entries on an alien culture.

In my original thoughts, both the lexicographer and the annotator were male, two standard types of literary academics, one more flamboyant and fraudulent, one more ner...

The nebulous "Midwest"

I grew in in Illinois, in suburban Chicago. I have relatives in Minnesota, Ohio, and Michigan. I am a Midwesterner, and will never be anything else. Acute ears here in Boston can instantly peg me to, not only the greater Midwest, but the Great Lakes area.

So I am surprised that there is debate about which states are actually in the Midwest. In this survey from 538, only 80% of respondents thought Illinois was in the Midwest. Who are these people, and why do they bother having opinions about an...

"Feral Moon" on StarShipSofa

My story "Feral Moon" came out in Asimov's last year. It's a work of military SF, somewhat out of my usual line, and I was pleased with it. It had been a long time since I'd written a solid novella. It dealt with the specific tactical issues of fighting your way through an inhabited asteroid (moon, really, this taking place inside Phobos) as well as the strategic issues of a too-long series of wars and the emotional issues of a recently dissolved marriage.

StarShipSofa has done an audio versio...

The continued life of my one quote

As I've mentioned before, when you write things, you can never be sure what will catch someone else's imagination. While I think I have coined many sly and clever aphorisms in my time, the one that has had real legs is

This is my "rose red city, half as old as time"

This nice graphic comes from this article, which informs me that Billy Beane, the baseball GM who was the subject of Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, is particularly fond of the quote. The article is nice in that it cites me very spe...

Odd bits of Mound-Builder-related art

I am currently working on a story that involves archeological hoaxes and the Mound Builder myth. One research book is Mound Builders of Ancient America, by SF's own Robert Silverberg. He has written several pleasing historical works during his career, and this one is complete, well-researched, and well-written.

One thing that strikes me is the cover illustration. which is identified as "An American Battle Mound" from a book called Traditions of De-coo-dah, by William Pidgeon (1858), an imagina...

Apologetics: explaining why what seems to a bug is actually a feature

I'm going to start out with my clever definition of what the word "apologetics" means, and then I'm going to relate to a somewhat ill-mannered thing I sometimes do while giving a critique in a writing workshop. Ready?

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Gross and Livingstone (why should an atheist have this massive tome sitting in the bookshelf closest his work desk? The world is full of mysteries. Even if you are an atheist) defines apologetics as "The defence of Christian beli...

Are there Pantones for teeth?

In the past I have praised dentists for their largely unsung role in making our lives better.

Today I will do it again. A few months ago I lost a chunk of a tooth, and finally went in to get a crown fitted. I learned two interesting things.

One is that many crowns are now made of zirconia, a different form than that used for earrings sold on QVC, but based on the same properties of hardness. In a few weeks I will have zirconia in my mouth. I'll let you know how that works. Every time you go to...